


always in the last place you look

by shinealightonme



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Dialogue, Canon Queer Character, Episode Related, Episode: s03e01 The New Guy, Episode: s03e02 Trials, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Queer Gen, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 08:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3929971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It never does occur to Steve that his soulmate could be a <em>woman</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always in the last place you look

Steve is eleven when his mark finally shows up; positively ancient for his soulmate to just have been born.

His worry over the lack of a mark (the horrible, sneaking thought that he doesn't deserve love because there's something wrong with him) transmutes into worry over what it means.

There's the part where he's eleven years older than his soulmate, which maybe isn't the worst thing in the world but is -- weird. It's weird, right? He does the math, when he gets old enough to really think about the implications, and figures that either the age gap is going to be creepy the first time he meets his soulmate or else he's going to be kept waiting a couple of decades to meet him, and neither of those is a really tempting prospect.

Then there's the part where it sounds incredibly suspicious, that the first words his soulmate will say to him are _Listen, we work for the museum_. Steve can't detect a lie in writing, but he's a bit of an expert on lying in general, and the phrasing is too defensive for him to take it at face value. A real museum employee would just say 'welcome to the museum' or something equally bland.

Given all that, Steve doesn't like to talk about his mark, is not really excited at the thought of meeting -- whoever it's going to be.

It never does occur to him that his lying, too young soulmate could be a _woman_ , though. That is beyond even the limits of his pessimism.

-

Claudia misses out on the whole 'gushing over your soul mark' part of childhood and adolescence, courtesy of, you know, missing out on the whole 'childhood and adolescence' part of childhood and adolescence.

She knows it's _there_ , of course, on the bottom of her foot of all places, where she has to bend herself into a little yoga pretzel to read it, _Slow turn and hands, please_. She doesn't often bother. It's kind of hard to give a shit about finding your soulmate when you've got a real, concrete -- well, ghostly transparent, whatever -- brother who needs finding.

And it's a pretty dumb thing to say. Is her soulmate a dance instructor? A Hokie-Pokie enthusiast?

"Oh my God," Myka says with a laugh late one night, or maybe early morning, at the B&B. "Your soulmate is going to arrest you."

"That's our little degenerate." Pete gives her a noogie.

Claudia shoves him off. "At least it's not a dance thing. I have two left feet. I have worse than that. I have two left cinder blocks, I would have to get upgraded to have two left feet."

She goes back to not worrying about it. Her soulmate is going to arrest her. Seems pretty simple.

No sense in looking for trouble when trouble's already so good at finding her.

-

He _does_ find her, but she almost misses him because 90% of her brainpower is on the fire and the bolts of electricity and the impending Hendrix-themed doom and the _we're all going to die_ of it all.

What bandwidth she has available is taken up with the delightful threesome of _silly Artie, doubting me_ , and _fuck yeah, Tesla grenade_ , and _Purple Haze, when I get my hands on that guitar, or All Along the Watchtower?_

And then of course the gun in her face is incredibly distracting, even though it ought to have provided her with _context_.

It's only later, en route to the Warehouse, that she realizes the significance of what he said. There's a slight _frisson_ of excitement, which huh, wow, apparently she _is_ the kind of girl who gets excited about soulmates, a little. But it's more overpowered by:

"What the hell, a gun nut?"

Pete gives her a weird look.

Claudia points at her foot. "That guy. ATF. He said my words."

"Whaaaaaat?"

"My soulmate is a gun nut," Claudia says again, slowly, trying to make sense of it. "That can't be right."

"Maybe it's some other guy who's going to arrest you," Pete says around a mouthful of Snickers.

"Maybe," Claudia says, but she can't make herself buy it. "I just -- gah. Maybe he programs on the weekends? In his free time? Maybe he's usually a tech guy and they just had to put him in the field because it was an emergency?"

"Maybe." Claudia can see the caramel on Pete's molars, ew, she shoves a hand in his face.

"He's got to know Python, at least," Claudia sniffs. "Maybe Java. I can settle for him not knowing C, but come on, if he can't at _least_ do a little light html coding, I'm taking him back to the soulmate store and getting a refund."

"You go, girl." Pete offers her what's left of the Snickers. "I think you need this now more than I do."

"Not now that you've slobbered on it, geez!"

-

Steve doesn't make the connection right away, either, which he blames on the life-endangering and worldview-shattering events he'd been in the middle of.

It isn't until he's reporting back to his superiors on what happened inside the museum, staring into their openly disbelieving faces, that he hears himself repeat back exactly what she said to him and --

Damn. She sure looked young enough to be his soulmate. She'd been attractive, Steve guesses, in an alternative, hipster, _female_ sort of way, and there are probably a bunch of guys on the squad who would count themselves lucky to be in Steve's shoes right now. He just feels blindsided.

Could he, maybe, be attracted to a woman, to that particular woman? He thinks the red hair is a little off putting. Not to mention the breasts, and the oh god now he's thinking about some strange girl's breasts, she's practically a teenager, and he feels like a creep.

There is, of course, every possibility that he will _never see her again_ , that they'll be ships passing in the night, now that she's vanished off to whatever sorts of illegal, supernatural, dangerous things she does when she's not making happily gay men have existential crises. But it's hard to think of 'never see my soulmate again' as a best-case scenario. 

Steve really wonders what he screwed up in his last life to get this soul-mark-shaped karma.

-

Pete pitches a fit when Artie tells them that ATF guy is joining the team, and Claudia misses Myka as much as the next extraordinarily dysfunctional Warehouse agent, but she can't get mad about it, because, _come on_. Because her soulmate is going to come back to her, is going to work at the Warehouse. Her soulmate is named Steve _Jinks_ , how cool is that, like some kind of cartoon character, and they'll be working together and saving each other's lives and maybe he isn't exactly her type but she can buy him some thick rimmed clear lens glasses and talk him into growing his hair out a bit. It's going to be awesome.

She sneaks up on him when he's arriving, because how could she not take the opportunity to intel gather and show off her stealth mode? Also, maybe, you know, it's occurred to her that he might not have realized they were soulmates -- she almost didn't, and there had been no sign of recognition from him at the time -- and she doesn't want to come out all guns blazing if he's still a bit behind.

Except it doesn't work out, quite, like she expected; he's not thrilled to see her, but not stupid, either. There's a watchful look in his eyes like he's assessing her, and like he's not impressed.

So, fine, she plays haughty with him and interrogates him about his car and makes him fix the damn fish. She's fucking awesome and if he's not excited about having her for a soulmate then she doesn't care if the fish get him.

-

"Oh, I get it," Claudia says during the stake-out, peering at him through her eyelashes, which is a thing that has absolutely never happened to Steve before, he didn't think women _did_ that outside of movies.

"Get what? What are you getting? What's happening here?"

Claudia, swear-to-GOD Steve could not make this up, does a casual little shrug that sticks her chest out, and Steve snaps his eyes forward, out the windshield, like the empty street is the most interesting thing he's ever seen. "We're out of town, alone, two reasonably attractive single people -- "

He should say something. He should already have said something. He really, really should have seen this coming, because Claudia is barreling at him with all the momentum and subtlety of a freight train. "Uh -- "

"It's okay, it's not like I'm not flattered, I am, and hey, I heard those words too, not to drop the 's' word or anything, it's just that I really need to focus on my career right now, I don't have a ton of bandwidth for other stuff, as attractive as that other stuff may be, okay, so maybe in a year or two, we can revisit this whole wacky soulmate thing and see what's there -- "

"Oh my God," Steve finally spits out. Apparently enough second-hand embarrassment can derail a metaphorical freight train. "I am not hitting on you. I'm gay."

If he didn't want to look at her when she was trying to use sex appeal on him, he _really_ doesn't want to look at her now. "You're how now?"

"Gay. You know, when two people of the same sex find each other -- "

"No, I know what gay means!"

Steve shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Maybe they will be ships passing in the night after all, because after this unbearable conversation he can't imagine Claudia ever wanting to be in the same room as him. "I don't usually make a big deal about it."

"No, I think you made just about the right size deal out of it, maybe a little too small of a deal? Maybe you could have made a banner and waved it around, I don't know, say when you knew I knew you were my soulmate? Or at the very least when I started talking five-minutes-slash-an-eternity ago?"

"You're -- kind of hard to interrupt," Steve tells her. "I thought, you know, you'd need to breathe at some point."

"I can hold my breath a really long time and oh god I swear that wasn't supposed to sound dirty but right now everything sounds dirty, or, everything that doesn't sound like resounding mortification."

"Yeah, I think I know what you mean," and Steve gets up the nerve to make eye contact with her. "I wasn't -- I didn't mean to embarrass you or anything. It's just been...really, really confusing? I mean, on top of learning about the Warehouse and artifacts and having to accept the fact that Pete is a person that exists, somehow -- "

"Those are the three big mysteries of life, Warehouse and artifacts and Pete." Claudia's face is about the same shade as her hair, right now, but the shell shock is wearing off.

"And on top of that little triumvirate of weird, I find out that my soulmate is someone I am not attracted to, at all. Uh. Not to be rude."

"No, no, I deserve it," Claudia sighs. "Name me for the hideous crone that I am, anything you say to me right now will be kind compared to what I am saying to myself in here." She taps her temple.

"Now you're just being dramatic."

"It's kind of my M.O., which you should be made aware of, PSMOM."

"PSMOM?"

"Platonic Soul Mate Of Mine."

"Man, Guns 'N' Roses later stuff got weird."

"A-hah!" Claudia turns to face him, a giant look of surprise on her face. "It has a sense of humor! Thank god. The not-attracted-to-me thing I can live with, but if my soulmate was really as un-funny as you seemed, I don't know _what_ I'd do."

"I'm funny," Steve protests mildly. He thinks Claudia looks a thousand times better like this, honestly excited, than she did faking sultry.

"Sure you are, poopy-pants." Claudia pats him condescendingly on the knee. "Stick with me, though, we'll see if we can't make you _even funnier_." Then a weird look passes over her face and she pulls her hand back quickly. "That was a totally non-sexual, non-bad-touch, manly -- shit, not manly, you would go for manly -- _wo_ manly leg pat, like I would give to my dearest and straightest girlfriends, if I had any such thing."

"Got it," Steve says, his eyes crinkling up with a smile. "And just to be really sure, what do you say we make a soulmate pact to never, ever, ever talk about the awkward-hitting-on-each-other thing ever again?"

"Seconded, thirded, and fourthed," Claudia agrees fervently, and Steve thinks he sees a glimpse, a little glimpse, of how she could be his other half.


End file.
